Individualizing
Let's Get Moving!
- Grade level: Upper Elementary, Middle School
- Subject Area: Health and Sports, Math
Unit Description
This unit encourages students to consider many different forms of
physical activity which might appeal to them, to keep track of how
much exercise they get, and to compare their own activity choices
with those of other students around the country.
Objectives
Students will:
- Keep a daily log of their own physical activities for a one
or two-week period.
- Consider which activities they are most
likely to participate in on a regular basis.
- Consider ways to
involve their family members in their physical activities.
- Use
the Internet to to compare and discuss physical activity choices with
other children around the world.
Materials and Resources
In developing our lessons and activities,
we made some assumptions about the hardware and software that would
be available in the classroom for teachers who visit the LETSNet
Website. We assume that teachers using our Internet-based lessons or
activities have a computer with the necessary hardware components
(mouse, keyboard, and monitor) as well as a World Wide Web browser.
In the section below, we specify any "special" hardware or
software requirements for a lesson or activity (in addition to those
described above) and the level of Internet access required to do the
activity.
- Special hardware requirements: none.
- Special
software requirements: none.
- Internet access:
Medium-speed (28,000 BPS via modem) or higher.
Unit Lesson Plans
- Lesson One: Keeping a Physical
Activity Log. In this activity, students take home a log to keep
a record of their daily and weekly physical activity patterns. This
allows them to assess their curent physical activity habits.
- Lesson Two: Classroom Comparison of
Activities. Students bring in their physical activity logs and
work in pairs to calculate their average amount of physical activity
per day during the week in which the data is collected. Following
this, the whole class gathers to calculate both their total and
average amounts of physical activity per student per week and per
day.
- Lesson Three: Family Fitness Students will consider which physical activities
are best suited to the needs of their family members. Next they will
consider a few activities in which they can participate together with
family members, and describe a strategy to help their family become
more physically active.
Relation to Standards
We have drawn on standards suggested by
the National Association of Sport and Physical Education (NASPE)
These standards
provide excellent guidelines for teachers on how to focus this kind
of research work in their classrooms.
One Computer versus Many
The plans for this unit are tailored to
fit teaching situations where students have access to several
computers with an Internet connection, or where they have access to
computers outside of school. To accommodate classrooms that do not
have access to a computer lab with full Internet connections,
students can work in research groups to explore Internet sites and
conduct their research.
If you have only one computer with
Internet access, you may choose to do one of the following:
- If you have the technology, you may hook up the computer to
a TV monitor or LCD projector. This will allow the whole class to see
sites in the preliminary stages when students are exploring sites
created by other children.
- You may choose to have students take
turns working in groups using the computer with Internet access.
- You may also download files from the Internet and save them on a
disk. Now you can transfer the files you saved on a disk to the other
non-Internet computers. Installing copies of your Web browser on all
non-Internet computers will allow you to view the pages you saved to
a disk. This will not allow students to explore hyper-links, but they
will be able to access and view the information by opening each file
with the Web browser.
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